This article give me a nervous twinge when I realized that if Google ever got Chrome to be a majority-share browser, they would really know everything there is to know about the web.
In effect, their algorithms/rankings could be peerless because they would actually know what every end user does and sees on the web.
The browser is wonderful but it's quite chatty about all of your Internet habits. I wonder if this message appears even if you turn off all the "send my history to Google" preferences.
Chrome is open source, so in case something like this happen you can either investigate the source code, or create a more privacy compliant version. No such luck with I.E. or Safari.
While Chromium is open source, Chrome is not and could certainly "hide" away such features, but you're right to say that a more-private fork could / would be close behind.
I use the daily build of chromium on my ubuntu linux.
I'm pretty sure that it's the main line of development and I regularly receive new features, new bugs and new bug fixes as days passes. After some time all this goes to the chrome beta and finally in the chrome release.
I don't think that google adds tons of code 'behind' the back of the opensource repository which is then merged only a few weeks later, because I see a gradual change (aka. the phenotype of those changes) in the daily builds from the chromium repository.
What's wrong here is that he's refusing to work with a willing upstream. It would be much better for everyone if he submitted patches to Google to allow everyone using Chrome to optionally turn off these tracking features.
Instead he's needlessly forking the project to "bring a lot of publicity to my person and my homepage". That's not being a good open source citizen.
He claims that in Germany he can make a lot of money at this. If he can then it means he's taking an open source project and doing something with it to make money. It doesn't even sound like he's closing the source of his fork (assuming he would even have this option). It's not the most efficient thing but if he really can make money with this I don't see much fault in it. It's risky because someone else could just push these changes back to Chrome killing his revenue stream.
Sure, it's just that the whole thing has a big "Google's all about stealing your data" vibe in its advertisements.
When in fact Google would be happy to take his patches, and most of those data-sharing features are improving the user experience (like type-ahead suggestions etc.).
No. Because they don't really care. They're not trying to understand your behavior to display ads you're more likely to click on. Google? it's their core business.
Don't forget they have an OS as well, even if they were doing it today, how could we know? Who knows if they are doing it covertly under the guise of windows updates.
I would have assumed MS would use some encryption on the data they send, which would mean that nobody could ever know except Microsoft. That said, I don't know that any sort of encryption is used for Windows Updates. But they could do it...
In effect, their algorithms/rankings could be peerless because they would actually know what every end user does and sees on the web.
The browser is wonderful but it's quite chatty about all of your Internet habits. I wonder if this message appears even if you turn off all the "send my history to Google" preferences.